标签： Europe

In a powerful testament to human resilience amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Kyiv couple defied devastating missile attacks and shattered apartment ruins to walk down the aisle on their long-delayed wedding day.

Liudmyla Ryzhak had spent the final night before her September 8 wedding carefully pressing her intricately embroidered bridal gown, arranging the flowing white tulle skirt, and hanging her fiancé Leonid’s traditional patterned shirt on the bedroom door. After months of repeated postponements forced by the war, and a week and a half of waiting for Leonid — a Ukrainian soldier serving on the eastern front — to get a rare break from deployment to the Pokrovsk area, the wedding was finally just hours away.

But as the couple slept, a Russian strike targeted a warehouse located directly across the street from their apartment building. The force of the blast sent a shockwave tearing through their home, blowing out every window, toppling furniture, shredding curtains into tatters and burying their wedding garments under piles of glass and debris. The strike came just days after a high-profile visit by U.S. envoys to Kyiv, which had brought a temporary lull in Russian bombardments. When attacks resumed, Russian forces launched a sustained barrage of drones and missiles that kept Kyiv under siege for nearly five hours overnight, with strikes continuing through Tuesday morning.

Stumbling out of bed, their ears still ringing from the explosion, the couple’s first priority was reaching shelter before a feared follow-up strike. They fled to a nearby bomb shelter with Liudmyla’s 6-year-old daughter from a previous marriage and the family’s two guinea pigs, leaving their missing cat — which had hidden in terror — behind. Their quick escape proved lifesaving: a second strike hit the area shortly after they evacuated, leaving their apartment completely uninhabitable until major repairs can be completed.

Once the immediate danger passed, the couple returned to dig their wedding clothes out of the wreckage. Liudmyla pulled her tulle skirt from under a pile of concrete chunks and shattered glass, carefully brushing debris off the fabric. Tiny, faint tears marked the skirt from its time under rubble, but it was still wearable. Leonid was not so lucky: his dress pants were destroyed, leaving him with no choice but to wear his army trousers to the ceremony.

This was not the first time Liudmyla has survived a Russian attack on her home. Just three weeks earlier, on August 20, another strike shattered her windows and cut the building’s gas lines, leaving her so shaken that she hesitated to return for weeks. But as the wedding approached and the new school year loomed for her daughter, she pushed past her fear to rebuild a semblance of normal life.

The couple’s path to the altar had been rocky long before the overnight strike. Three years earlier, Liudmyla and Leonid — both single adults with children from previous relationships — met through mutual friends with no expectation of a serious romance. What started as a casual friendship deepened as Liudmyla supported Leonid through repeated deployments to the front lines, slowly growing into a quiet, enduring love. After Leonid finally arrived in Kyiv for his long-awaited leave, the pair faced another barrier: for six straight days, air-raid sirens forced the registry office to close before they could submit their marriage paperwork. When they finally completed the process, they were assigned a wedding date of September 8. Neither could have predicted their home would be destroyed by a Russian strike that same night.

Despite the chaos and destruction, the couple refused to call off the wedding. Echoing the resolve of millions of Ukrainians who have refused to let war upend every part of daily life, they resolved to move forward. “If God gave me a continuation of life, then why should I put it off?” Liudmyla said. “For someone, it ended. And who can guarantee this won’t happen again tomorrow? That tomorrow won’t come for us? At least for now, I have the right to be happy. Both him and me.”

Dusting off their damaged wedding clothes, the couple made their way to the registry office, arriving exactly on time at 10:40 a.m. When they stepped out of their apartment building, they were greeted by an apocalyptic scene: a thick column of black smoke rose behind a brightly colored neighborhood children’s playground, and neighbors were already picking through the rubble of damaged homes. Many stopped their work to congratulate the couple, to which Liudmyla replied, “We should all be celebrated, that we survived.”

Their journey was not yet over. Shortly after they arrived at the registry office, another air-raid siren wailed, signaling a new incoming Russian attack. The building was evacuated for safety, and the couple waited for nearly three hours in the courtyard as explosions echoed across nearby districts and fires broke out across the capital. When the all-clear finally sounded, they rushed inside to finally hold their ceremony.

Waiting just outside the ceremony hall, the pair traded nervous jokes to ease their tension. “I didn’t even get to finish the repairs at home,” Leonid joked, referencing their now-destroyed apartment. “I’ve never had such a spectacular day,” Liudmyla replied.

When the ceremony began, the officiant told the couple, “Love is when two people become a team.” Moments later, they were officially pronounced husband and wife. “We’re gaining a new life, because we survived,” Liudmyla told reporters after the ceremony. “You could probably call it a new life because it could have ended today, and none of this would happen. In a different scenario, I wouldn’t be wearing this dress. Someone would be picking out something else for me instead, something darker.”

On Tuesday evening, a tense standoff between Albanian law enforcement and hundreds of anti-government protesters spilled over into clashes in central Tirana, marking the 100th consecutive day of demonstrations against a controversial luxury coastal development tied to Jared Kushner, son-in-law of former U.S. President Donald Trump.

The unrest coincided with the Albanian parliament’s first sitting following its annual summer recess, a moment demonstrators targeted to amplify their demands. Protesters attempted to break through a heavy police cordon erected to block access to the parliament building, pelting officers in full riot gear with eggs and tomatoes as they pushed forward. In response, police secured the perimeter and escorted seated lawmakers safely to and from the legislative chamber. Multiple demonstrators were taken into custody by authorities, though an official confirmation of formal arrests had not been released as of Wednesday morning.

The ongoing protest movement has been dubbed the “Flamingo Revolution”, a name drawn from demonstrators’ signage highlighting the threat the construction project poses to local pink flamingo populations that inhabit the coastal project site. What began as a single-issue campaign focused solely on halting the large-scale coastal development has expanded over three months into a broad challenge to the authority of Albania’s long-governing Socialist Party, which has held power for over a decade.

Critics of the project argue that the luxury resort development will cause irreversible damage to the Adriatic coastal ecosystem, and will close off miles of public shoreline to ordinary Albanian citizens. The investment project has remained a top policy priority for Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, who is one of the primary targets of the demonstrators’ anger. Rama has repeatedly defended the development, framing it as a critical catalyst for modernizing Albania’s tourism sector and growing the national economy after decades of isolation under communist rule. During Tuesday’s clashes, protesters chanted calls for Rama’s resignation and arrest, underscoring the deepening political divide around the project that has gripped the Balkan nation.

One of the deadliest migrant tragedies in modern English Channel history has moved into the French courtroom, with 14 alleged people smugglers facing trial over their alleged roles in a 2021 sinking that killed at least 30 people, including children.

The disaster unfolded on November 23, 2021, when an overloaded, unseaworthy motorized dinghy deflated and began taking on water mid-voyage between northern France and the United Kingdom. To reduce the vessel’s weight as it took on water, passengers jumped into the frigid Channel one by one, only to succumb to hypothermia and drown. Just two people on board survived the incident, which remains the deadliest small boat crossing disaster on record in the Channel.

Official charging documents detail that the defendants supplied an unsafe, low-quality vessel unfit for open sea navigation, overloaded it with passengers, and provided inadequate life jackets for the group. In the aftermath of the sinking, rescue teams recovered 27 bodies, while four additional people were never found and are officially confirmed dead. The victims came from multiple countries across the Middle East and Africa: the majority were Iraqi Kurds, with others from Somalia, Ethiopia, Egypt and Afghanistan. The youngest victim identified was just seven years old.

Most of the 14 defendants, who are mostly Afghan nationals, are being tried in court in Paris. They face two key charges: manslaughter and facilitating illegal immigration as part of a structured criminal network. The two alleged ringleaders of the smuggling operation are still at large and are being tried in absentia. The vast majority of the accused have rejected all charges brought against them. Many claim they are also migrants themselves, and argue any involvement they had was under coercion from the actual senior organizers of the crossing.

Family members of the deceased traveled to Paris to attend the opening of the trial, which is scheduled to run for three weeks. Emmanuel Daoud, a lead lawyer representing multiple victim families, condemned the smuggling network for what he called deliberate, cynical disregard for human life. “Migrants are not sailors,” Daoud told reporters outside court. “The smugglers know perfectly well what they are doing. They take the deliberate, conscious risk of sending migrants to their deaths.”

Beyond the charges against the accused smugglers, the tragedy has sparked official investigations into response failures on both sides of the Channel. Questions remain about why rescue agencies did not intervene sooner, despite multiple distress calls from the foundering vessel. In France, seven military personnel, including staff at a maritime rescue coordination center and crew of a French navy vessel, are currently under judicial investigation over potential charges of failing to assist people in danger. A judge will later decide whether these personnel will stand trial.

A separate official inquiry conducted in the United Kingdom uncovered systemic gaps in the British response: the HM Coastguard station in Dover was operating with limited capacity due to long-term chronic staff shortages, a scheduled surveillance aircraft was not deployed because of poor weather, and rescue staff broadly held the assumption that migrants calling from small boats often exaggerated their level of distress, leading to a dangerous underestimation of the emergency.

Twenty-two years after moving to Sweden to build a new life with her husband, 78-year-old retired British nurse Joyce Thomas now faces the devastating prospect of being forced from the only home she has known, separated from her son, grandchildren and the grave of her late husband who died of cancer three years ago. Her nightmare stems from a missed post-Brexit residence application, a rule she says she and her husband never even knew existed.

When the UK formally exited the European Union on 31 January 2020, British citizens lost their automatic right of residence across EU member states including Sweden. A transitional grace period under the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement allowed UK nationals already living in Sweden to apply for new legal residence status, but that window closed on 31 December 2021. Thomas told the BBC she and her husband received no official notification of their obligation to submit a formal application, and she only learned of the requirement when she tried to re-enter Sweden in 2023, long after the deadline had passed.

Since that discovery, every one of Thomas’s multiple applications and appeals for legal status has been rejected by Sweden’s Migration Agency (Migrationsverket). Tuesday 8 September marked her final deadline for voluntary departure from the country she has called home for more than two decades. Speaking from her Swedish home, Thomas described the ongoing uncertainty as unmanageable for an elderly widow. “This is absolute hell,” she said. “I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. You get up in the morning, you don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m tired, I really am tired and I’m not young anymore. Where is the empathy? I’ve lived here for more than 20 years – I’ve got friends, I’ve got family.” For Thomas, the cruelest blow of the deportation order is that it would force her to leave behind her husband’s resting place, as well as her adult son and grandchildren who all reside in Sweden.

Thomas is not an isolated case. Official data from Eurostat shows that between 2021 and 2025, 2,490 UK nationals received deportation orders from Sweden, accounting for nearly a third of all such orders issued to UK citizens across the 27 EU member states over that period. The Migrationsverket has confirmed that 458 British citizens have already been forcibly deported or removed from Sweden since Brexit, though it declined to comment on Thomas’s specific case without her explicit consent and would not share updated figures on how many other UK nationals currently face removal.

Thomas’s case is the second high-profile example of elderly UK long-term residents facing deportation in Sweden in recent weeks. Last month, a family told the BBC their 78-year-old father, who lives in full-time care with dementia and vascular parkinsonism, also received a removal order after more than 20 years of living in the country.

In response to growing public and media attention, Swedish Migration Minister Johan Forssell has signaled a potential shift in the government’s approach. Forssell told the BBC that the current strict regulatory framework was put in place by the previous Swedish administration, and his government is now re-evaluating the situation. “We will therefore look closely at the situation and examine whether there are measures we can take to make the process easier for those affected,” Forssell said. While he did not directly address Thomas’s individual case, he noted that “the government believes the rules should be applied generously. The UK is a very important partner for Sweden, and we want British citizens who live and work in Sweden to be able to remain here. We are currently in dialogue with the relevant Swedish authorities to get a clearer picture of what measures may be possible.”

The UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office has also weighed in on the issue, welcoming Sweden’s promise to review the situation. “We welcome the statement from the Swedish authorities that they will look at this issue,” a FCDO spokesperson said. “We are ready to support them in doing so.”

As of Tuesday’s voluntary departure deadline, Thomas remains in her home, with her legal team still fighting the deportation order. She is waiting anxiously for word on whether the Swedish government will grant her leniency to spend her final years close to her family and her husband’s memory.

After days of a nationwide manhunt, German law enforcement has taken into custody a 48-year-old man suspected of orchestrating a coordinated series of sabotage attacks targeting the country’s critical electricity infrastructure. Cologne police confirmed the suspect was apprehended on Tuesday in the vicinity of the Weisweiler power plant in western Germany, where he was found in possession of explosive materials at the time of arrest.

Investigators later discovered a secondary cache of explosives that had been rigged in a tent hidden in nearby undergrowth, adding to the scale of the potential threat the suspect posed. Bomb disposal specialists have been deployed to examine all recovered explosive devices, while search teams continue to sweep the surrounding area to rule out any unaccounted-for explosive devices that may have been placed ahead of the arrest.

Identified by German media outlets as Daniel V. – in line with the country’s strict privacy regulations that prohibit publishing full surnames of criminal suspects – the man is believed to have sent multiple handwritten letters claiming responsibility for the sabotage campaign, which spanned three German states: Brandenburg and Saxony in the east, and North Rhine-Westphalia in the west. Major German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung confirmed it received two of the confession letters, which contained non-public details about the attacks only the perpetrator would know, and were signed with the suspect’s first name and listed a residential address in Gevelsberg.

The pattern of attacks that unfolded over the past week has followed a consistent, damaging blueprint: attackers used rockets to launch conductive wires across high-voltage transmission cables, triggering intentional short circuits that forced multiple power-generating units at affected plants to be temporarily taken offline. A day before the suspect’s arrest, on Monday afternoon, investigators had already discovered several unexploded launch devices near high-voltage lines outside the Weisweiler facility, alongside a third confession letter linking Daniel V. to the plot.

During the manhunt, police publicly released the suspect’s photo to German media outlets to solicit public tips as they tracked his movements across the country. A search of the suspect’s Gevelsberg apartment conducted prior to his capture had already turned up stockpiles of explosive materials, according to previous police statements.

In Saxony, one of the hardest-hit states, law enforcement found 21 separate explosive devices placed near high-voltage power lines during searches conducted last Friday and Saturday. German Interior Minister Armin Schuster acknowledged that the coordinated campaign came perilously close to causing a widespread regional blackout that would have disrupted critical services and daily life for tens of thousands of residents, though he urged the public and media to avoid drawing premature conclusions about the suspect’s motive or broader connections.

“This case is unusual both in the method of the attacks and the way the suspect has claimed responsibility,” Schuster told reporters. A joint statement released Tuesday by the Cologne Public Prosecutor’s Office and Cologne Police did not share additional details about the suspect’s background, potential motives, or the full scope of attacks he is suspected of carrying out, as the investigation remains ongoing.